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Martin Luther King, the American dream and Vietnam: A collision of rhetorical trajectories
Abstract
This essay explores the rhetorical complexity of Martin Luther King's dual role as political and moral leader, particularly during his last years when he was attacked for his opposition to the Vietnam War. By: 1) discussing and developing the theoretical value and critical possibilities associated with the term “rhetorical trajectories,”; 2) tracing the trajectories present in King's rhetoric in order to set the context for a speech he gave in 1967 at Riverside Church, and 3) analyzing the text of that speech, the essay offers insight into King's rhetorical impact, and, as a result, into the possibilities and limitations for combining pragmatic and moralistic discourse in American society.
... This rhetorical construction of a usable past identifies Americans as a special people with a sacred mission and appeals to secular texts of great cultural salience (Jasinski, 2001;Murphy, 1990). 3 In order to consider how appeals to the discursive tradition of the jeremiad might be translated for the cinematic medium, we must also consider elements of genre (or audience) expectation and the ideological potential of the rhetorical form (e.g., Bercovitch, 1978;Dionisopoulos, et al., 1992;Jasinski, 1997bJasinski, , 1999aMurphy, 1990). Subsequent sections of the essay will consider the challenges of visual transformation of discursive practices and the ideological implications of oxymoronic appeals to temporal relations (the future depends upon the past). ...
The American jeremiad long has been an established rhetorical form that operates as a corrective to conditions gone awry. In response to a “falling away,” the jeremiad issues a call to the community to return home to idealized foundational principles. The American experience in Vietnam produced in the national community a crisis of faith in foundational principles and precipitated a crisis of representation of national identity. This essay argues that the secular American jeremiad emerges prominently in Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan. Through a close reading of the film, contextualized by the preceding twenty years of popular cinematic lamentation following Vietnam, I argue that the film operates, in part, as a rhetorically skillful response to the post-Vietnam crisis of national identity. I further argue that Spielberg both acknowledges and appropriates the crisis, offering viewing audiences a “way home” to mythic America. The essay concludes with a discussion of the tensions between the conservative mandate in the jeremiadic form and the possibilities for social transformation.
Donald Trump’s election in 2016 triggered an identity crisis for many Republican Party leaders. One such Republican – Sen. Jeff Flake – framed this crisis as a test of conservative principles and challenged Trumpism in the American jeremiadic tradition. Flake employed the rhetoric of martyrdom to explain his opposition to his party’s president and justify his retirement from public office. We analyze Flake’s construction of rhetorical martyrdom within the American jeremiad. Flake’s rhetoric is carefully constructed political communication that purposely serves as a reformative guidepost for current and future political actors navigating intraparty conflict and political pressures.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s anti-war speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” is a noteworthy example of deliberation by dissent from the margins. Attention is given to the formation of his moral argument from similitude, its foundation in metaphor and archetypal imagery, and how it shifted perspective to enable the introduction of alternative lines of argument. King’s argumentation, as it worked rhetorically toward making the war debatable, exhibited key features of deliberative dissent, including catachresis, contingency, perspective, and incommensurability.
This essay examines David Zarefsky's contributions to the research, teaching, and practice of public address, arguing that his career exemplifies the thorough intertwining of these variant forms of rhetorical art. It also demonstrates Zarefsky's key concern with studying rhetorical history in order to promote greater understanding of argumentative trajectories across time and to encourage inclusive, productive deliberation in the present.
What arguments have critics of American wars and interventions put forward, and what arguments do they currently employ? Thomas Jefferson, Henry Thoreau, John Calhoun, the Anti-Imperialist League, Herbert Hoover, Charles Lindbergh, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ron Paul (among others) have criticized proposals to intervene in other countries, enter wars, acquire foreign territory, and engage in a forward defense posture. Despite cogent objections, they have also generally lost the argument. Why do they lose?
The mainstream press frequently characterized the election of President Barack Obama the first African American US President as the realization of Martin Luther King's dream, thus crafting a postracial narrative of national transcendence. I argue that this routine characterization of Obama's election functions as a site for the production of selective amnesia, a form of remembrance that routinely negates and silences those who would contest hegemonic narratives of national progress and unity.
This essay explores the extent to which memorials that are connected with issues of national conflict can lead to the construction of shared memories or fictions of the past. In contrast to recent critical analyses that have focused on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, this study analyzes a Civil‐Bights related memorial—the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Atlanta—through the development and application of the concept of “rhetorical integration.” The findings demonstrate that even though rhetorical integration is elusive, memorials can, through aspects of form, function, symbolism and location, provide space, motivation and inventional resources for continued engagement.
In his post‐presidential discourse, Ronald Reagan did not assume a typical jeremiadic posture, warning that America was straying from conservative dogma. Instead, he warned of other dangers, some of which required alteration in conservatism. He combined those warnings with an optimistic celebration of American exceptionalism. In that way, they served a function similar to a traditional jeremiad, but from an optimistic perspective and without any sense that the nation was straying from its covenant. We coin the term, Covenant‐affirming Jeremiad, to describe the rhetorical characteristic of these addresses.
In this essay I explore the ways in which the issue/image dichotomy operates as a default criticism of democratic practice by examining its basis in persistent tensions and idealistic theories of democracy. Turning to political practice, I then explore the articulation and value of political image rhetorics offered during the 2008 presidential election, paying particular attention to political advertisements from the Obama and McCain campaigns that appeared after their nominations were assured but before the national nominating conventions. Ultimately, I offer a normative justification of political image rhetorics in campaign discourse as beneficial to deliberation about public policy and political leadership.
The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was the result of a complex convergence of presidential public persuasion in a context of increasing domestic violence associated with a series of summer disturbances and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Analysis of Lyndon Johnson's public discourse supporting the 1968 Civil Rights Act reveals that rhetorical transcendence was employed as a recurrent strategy in attempts to pass legislation.
This article is a brief account of the events that led to the inauguration of Martin Luther King, Jr., as leader of the Montgomery (Alabama) bus boycott. The writer analyzes the address Dr. King gave on the night he became the chief spokesman for the movement.
Examining why Secretary of the Interior James Watt was forced to resign on October 9, 1983, this essay argues that Watt's rhetorical failure occurred because he violated the sacred values and shibboleths of the American Dream. The essay: (1) establishes a theoretical rationale for the use of American values and their relation to the American Dream as an aid in interpreting Watt's rhetorical failure; (2) focuses on the Watt persona as portrayed by the press, the Administration, and Congress as the primary shapers of constraints which framed Watt's rhetorical situation; (3) submits that the values implicit in Watt's rhetorical failure were rejected through epideictic discourse; and finally, (4) argues that rhetorical failure defined as a breach of decorum and public rejection of the rhetor's values provides an explanation for the Watt affair.
Robert F. Kennedy's response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. offers the opportunity to examine the rhetorical function of the modern American jeremiad. This essay argues that, while the jeremiad works well in the epideictic task of restoring social harmony in a time of crisis, it also operates as a rhetoric of social control. It precludes a close examination of the system that may well have created the crisis. Kennedy's rhetoric was a skillful reaction to his immediate rhetorical and political obstacles, but it illustrates the generic limitations of the American jeremiad as a vehicle for social criticism.
Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is an apostolic epistle in the Pauline tradition. Following the conventions of black American Protestantism, King discovered in St. Paul a type for himself and in St. Paul's letters a literary form that he could apply to modern situations. Like the Pauline letters, King's “Letter” depends heavily on scriptual allusions and may be seen as not only a letter but also as a sermon.
Speakers themselves within a speech sometimes suggest standards by which a rhetorical critic might at least partially evaluate that speech. In his speech, “Who is Tampering with the Soul of America?”, Jenkin Lloyd Jones suggests a cluster of images, a set of related rhetorical roles, that a critic usefully can employ to analyze the workings of this speech. Through direct statement and indirectly through word choice, Jones assumes the rhetorical roles of a “calamity howler” and an evangelist in the genre of a secular jeremiad. First the tradition of the American Puritan jeremiad and the characteristics of the contemporary secular jeremiad are traced. Then Jones's speech is analyzed as a “paradigm case” to further illuminate the nature of the contemporary secular jeremiad. Significant dimensions examined are: (1) internal and external evidence of Jones's self‐chosen role of Jeremiah, evangelist, and calamity howler; (2) invocation of the Puritan heritage and the American Dream; (3) value appeals and condemnations typical of the jeremiad genre; (4) stylistic creation of “presence” (5) use of historical and contemporary examples; and (6) intertwining of lamentation and optimism.
The nomination acceptance addresses of recent presidential candidates constitute a significant aspect of an American political ritual. These addresses might be termed a “modern jeremiad”; because they conform to the jeremiad tradition in American rhetoric. Like the Puritan jeremiad which was central to a religious ritual, the modern jeremiad continues to function rhetorically as a means for interpreting the meaning of America's past and unifying the audience around a shared vision of America's future.
Discusses the effective rhetoric of Dr. King's "Letter" in terms of his use of refutative logic to address two audiences simultaneously, using one to provide a focus through which the other could be addressed. The "Letter" is adapted to both audiences on structural, logical, and stylistic levels. (JMF)